What an odd bit of moralizing. GP said they enjoy doing the hard parts, in which case they probably do them, because it's fun. If they actually don't enjoy it, there's nothing wrong with them using the LLM, when it's up to the task, and then just checking to make sure the code is good.
I enjoy solving interesting problems in software. But when I was doing it for a living, the majority of my work was pretty tedious. I'd have been thrilled to turn over that part to AI and spend all my time doing the interesting stuff.
Don’t you get it? Machine do the tedious work, all we get to do now is the fun part and we can just relax the rest of the day.
I am producing 5x as before, my boss is paying me the same salary just for two hours of actual work per day. I have so much more time to pursue my passions.
I'm surprised you've had three replies so far that didn't notice your sarcasm.
But we've been automating the tedious work since the 1950s. There were probably devs back then complaining about imminent job loss when the first compilers were invented. Maybe some jobs were lost, temporarily, but ultimately we all got more ambitious about what software we could make. We ended up hiring more programmers and paying them better, because each one provided so much more value.
When the machines are able to do the hard stuff better than humans, that's when we'll really be in trouble.
I do not believe that past performance is a guarantee of future results. The era of well paid programmers in great demand is pretty much over, and it’s not only because of AI. Even if machines are dumb enough they require supervision, the big bosses do not care and will always prefer the dumb machine if it saves them money vs hiring a junior dev. It means the poor sods that supervise these machines will have to work harder to keep up with demand.
Maybe that'll happen one day, but it hasn't so far. As of this month, Glassdoor reports the median total pay for software developers across all industries and experience levels as $149K.
This but unironically. We're at a point where there is still a gap between what managers expect and how fast AI can work. I genuinely do have days where I finish a few tickets and I'm done.
Can't imagine you really think "the market forces" all point toward a utopia for the workers? We're all just gonna get paid for 2 hours of work a day and post pics from the beach with a special shout-out to Claude?
There are way fewer challenging problems that people are willing to pay me to solve.
Sure I would love to be working on some cutting edge challenging stuff, but the reality is it has been much more realistic to do the tedious stuff for pay instead
That actually sounds like something Claude could do pretty easily.
Yegge's book describes his coauthor's first vibe coding project. It went through screenshots he'd saved of youtube videos, read the time with OCR, looked up transcripts, and generated video snippets with subtitles added. (I think this was before youtube added subtitles itself.) He had it done in 45 minutes.
And using agents to control other applications is pretty common.
I'm halfway through Steve Yegge's book Vibe Coding. Yegge was quoted in the article:
> “We’re talking 10 to 20 — to even 100 — times as productive as I’ve ever been in my career,” Steve Yegge, a veteran coder who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents
That tool has been pretty popular. It was a couple hundred thousand lines of code and he wrote it in a couple months. His book is about using AI to write major new projects and get them reliable and production-ready, with clean, readable code.
It's basically a big dose of solid software engineering practices, along with enough practice to get a feel for when the AI is screwing up. He said it takes about a year to get really good at it.
(Yegge, fwiw, was a lead dev at Amazon and Google, and a well-known blogger since the early 2000s.)
Even if you're using Claude, canceling the IDEs might be poor strategy. Steve Yegge points out in his book that the indexing and refactoring tools in IDEs are helpful to AIs as well. He mentions JetBrains in particular as working well with AI. Your company's IDE savings could be offset by higher token costs.
Perhaps it would help if I include the quote, so from Vibe Coding pages 165-166:
> [IDEs index] your code base with sophisticated proprietary analysis and then serve that index to any tool that needs it, typically via LSP, the Language Services Protocol. The indexing capabilities of IDEs will remain important in the vibe coding world as (human) IDE usage declines. Those indexes will help AIs find their way around your code, like they do for you.
> ...It will almost always be easier, cheaper, and more accurate for AI to make a refactoring using an IDE or large-scale refactoring tool (when it can) than for AI to attempt that same refactoring itself.
> Some IDEs, such as IntelliJ, now host an MCP server, which makes their capabilities accessible to coding agents.
Yes, it's fantastic. Hard to imagine a better resource for getting started with vibe coding, on through developing large high-quality projects with it. It doesn't get into the details of particular tools much, so it should stay relevant for a while.
So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in downloading an already-made app when you can just trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an audience of exactly one.
Cars are here and you're wondering how someone could possibly make a faster horse. You wouldn't address user requests. You aren't a business. The users all make their own apps for themselves.
Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regressions when your next prompt is incompatible with existing features. If you are not retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.
You think you were able to prompt your way through creating hello world five years ago? Models improve and they need less and less guidance.
Combined with the fact that my use cases aren't your use cases, yes, it might be cheaper for me to make my own than to slog though software that wasn't built to serve my exact needs.
I’m not saying that there’s no need for specialty apps optimized for specific use cases or that you can’t use llms to create them more cheaply than last year. Only that the time to think through how the app should work and iterate on it is still significant in the way that it was last year if you were given the worlds best team of software engineers and they’d code to your product requirements. You’d only take this path for apps where the time tradeoff is worth it vs “off the shelf” apps.
The issue is that off the shelf apps were made at a time when it was too expensive to make apps. Everyone uses 2% of Word, Photoshop, etc, it's just a different 2% for each.
You only need to reimplement that 2% for yourself for it to be worth it, not the entire app.
Those "idea men" I've seen are usually not capable of following through a logical product, even if they start using AI. It's not just the code that's the barrier.
The prototypes or whatever can be handy to help them explain themselves to others of course.
You seem to be on the right track because supposedly for good gut health we need to eat at least thirty different plant foods each week. You've got twelve just for breakfast!
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